I know there’s a few confusingly placed dialogue boxes in this page – the shots were a bit differently planned in my mind but the reality of location within a physical room shredded a few of them. The Light is also a tad weird – for some reason part of the inn becomes oversaturated with light much easier than the characters do, and yet that light seems to fail to cast shadow. Nevermind that the light didn’t actually appear anywhere near as bright when posing as it did once rendered.

This is one of those retrospective pages – characters compile their knowledge so all of them knows the same things and remind the audience of these things while doing it. While I still have some lingering concerns about being too heavy-handed, most of them have shifted into one that I’m by default being far too subtle. Some things need to remain veiled of course – I’d love to be able to put together developments where I lead up to something and when The Reveal comes people will first go “Shock!” and then “Wait.. that makes perfect sense.”

Much like Schrödinger’s Cat, it’s hard to observe whether people without author-level knowledge actually got all the various forms of hints to all manner of developments that I hide in places – if I ask specifically whether something was noticed, they become aware of it and the game of subtleties is over. If I don’t, I’m not likely to find out. While I do have people who I bother for suggestions / input / advice on the plot and character designs on a regular basis, they now know a very significant part of what I plan to be hinting at so they tend to catch it by default.

In this very case of course, I’m sledgehammering down the existance of the Little Green Men, because you can never make enough fourth wall jokes about cultists and martians.